Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) classes have been the strong focus of discovery ( or constructivist, problem-based, active-learning) methods of instruction, certainly with some success...
Weekly Digest #97: Benefits and Pitfalls of Mindfulness Interventions in Schools
In today’s digest, we want to give a quick overview of different positions on mindfulness training in schools. Mindfulness is the experience of being present in the moment; an enhanced awareness of oneself. It can be achieved through different mediation exercises...
Memorizing versus Understanding
This post continues a series of posts on the value of memory. I wrote a few months ago about how memory is used for everything we do, and recently published a post-humus guest blog by Ralph A. Raimi in defense of memorization.
Weekly Digest #96: Why Teachers Blog
We love teacher blogs. They have become an amazing way to take a peek into a diverse set of classrooms, and for us sharing blogs has been a way to open up communication among many different types of educators, including teachers and researchers. If you're ...
Do Students Utilize Effective Learning Strategies?
For decades, and even centuries, cognitive psychologists have been studying the best ways to learn. For those who are frequent readers of our blog, I promise I won’t go on and on about the strategies and their evidence base… I know you’ve heard this all before. (But, for newer ...
GUEST POST: To Test or Not To Test? That Is Not The Question
If there’s one way to instantly divide opinion in the teaching profession, it’s to mention the word ‘testing’. Testing is seen by some as the evil part of education: created to destroy both student and teacher self-esteem. Often conceived in primary education as a one-hour written task,